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Gribble House paranormal experience tour lets guests be ghosthunters

Garry Patrick with the equipment guests use during the Gribble House Paranormal Experience.

“The sitting woman” inside an orb

Orbs with faces

Photos provided

Orbs are seen in this photo.

A group conducts an investigation among a field of orbs.

A black mist hovers over a window during the Gribble House Paranormal Experience.

Activity at the Gribble House Paranormal Experience, Savannah’s newest ghost tour, has progressed from orbs to apparitions and shadows.

The large brick building, which stands across the street from the Savannah Civic Center, may be the most haunted building in town.

The Gribble House Paranormal Experience is owned by Garry Patrick, who has done paranormal investigations around the world.

“Today, it’s been going on for six months,” Patrick says. “We’ve taken over 1,000 people through the building.

“We’ve gone from a lot of voices and photographs of orbs to actual sightings of black shadows. The activity has been crazy.

“We believe that whatever is in the building has a strong familiarity now with the investigators,” he says. “They are much more comfortable with us and are more active.”

Guests aren’t just seeing things in photographs.

“Our guests have seen everything from strange mists to shadows,” Patrick says. “A lady the other night looked in her viewfinder and saw a woman with a nasty, mean face.”

The area where the building now stands was once an active city block. “A great fire in 1850 wiped out the whole area,” Patrick says.

Some areas of the building are more paranormally active than others, and Patrick believes those same areas were active with those people when they were alive.

“When we looked at the original drawings, you can see four of the houses didn’t have kitchens,” he says. “They used a communal stove-pipe oven in the backyard.”

Considerable research has been done and will continue. “It took a lot of time,” Patrick says. “It painted a good picture.”

One house that stood on the site was the place a gruesome triple ax murder that took place in December 1909. Patrick named his business in honor of Eliza Gribble, a victim in the ax murders.

His interest in the paranormal began in his native Australia after some experiences when he was young.

“I’ve researched and done investigations in other countries and throughout Asia,” he says.

In addition to the story of the Gribble House, Patrick talks about the history of the block where it sat.

Paranormal activity has been experienced in the entire building, not just where the Gribble house once stood.

The tour offers an experience for certain tourists who are hardcore fans of the supernatural.

“It’s definitely a product that’s sort of a niche market,” Patrick says. “A lot of people come to Savannah and are looking to do something a little bit more in a paranormal way that is a little more intense, and this fills that void in the market.”

Each night, the Gribble House crew performs a two-hour investigation, allowing guests to become ghost hunters who use the latest, state-of-the-art equipment.

Some guests claim to have experienced being touched, scratched and pushed, Patrick says. Some also have reported bouts of anxiety and headaches.

Even so, some are so impressed with what they experience, they return again and again. Some have experiences, take photos or record EVPs — electronic voice phenomena — which some investigators believe are recordings of voices of the dead.

The experience starts with a briefing and training on the history of the Gribble House and how to use the equipment.

“We do a nightly report that goes out to all our investigators,” Patrick says.

“We comment on the amount of activity, where it occurred and what equipment was used to capture those activities. One night we might have had very strong EVPs, but visual activity was weak.

“As we’ve progressed equipment-wise, we’ve tried to have an even balance between the audio and visual equipment so people can see and hear things,” he says. “People don’t just want to hear something, they want to see something.”

“We have a lot of EMF detectors, which are electromagnetic field detectors. They detect fluctuations in the electromagnetic field.

“We have a lot of digital temperature gauges, which measure temperature drops in the building,” he says. “We also have motion sensors set up throughout the building.”

When investigators discovered what they believe to be spirits of children in the building, a Raggedy Ann doll was added to the equipment.

“It has light sensors in its hands and face,” Patrick says. “If anything goes near that doll, it actually lights up.”

A top hat believed to have belonged to someone associated with the site is used as a trigger object. The responses the Gribble House crew has gotten are attracting attention.

“We’re getting a lot of other paranormal groups coming in from all over the country to take the tour,” Patrick says. “They’re saying things like we’re getting more activity in two hours in our building than they’re ever catching in all the things they’ve done combined. They keep coming back and back and back.”

One portion of the building is built on top of what was once a slave quarters.

“I was locking up the building one night,” Patrick says.

“We had the door open and I heard shuffling feet. I looked in that direction and saw a shadow of a man put his head around the corner like he was peeping at me. He just whooshed himself away.”

Although Patrick believes the spirits in the building are harmless to living humans, they say a lot of hurtful things.